Tag: southern women

Blind-sided, thunderstruck, ambushed, stunned, floored flummoxed. Just flattened. By what’s just happened in our country – no, not what just happened – what just surfaced.

As my genteel cousin put it, “Surely not?” Exactly. Surely we are not the people screaming racist epithets, intimidating children, advocating jail for our rivals. We are not the people that believe silencing those who don’t look like us or believe like us will solve our problems. We are not the people who obsessed on the media’s 24/7 shouting matches, while shaking our heads about the ugly campaign. We don’t riot
in the streets after an election and burn the President Elect in effigy. We can’t be those people. And yet we are.

Until November 9, I carefully sidestepped awkward social and political conversations. After all, everyone’s entitled to her/his own opinion, right? And what does it matter really? Things will go on pretty much as they always have no matter what I do, right? So why risk damaging a friendship, causing a ruckus. Why be “that” woman? I really didn’t know what my friends, my neighbors, even some of my family, believed at a core level, didn’t really want to know, and didn’t share my own opinions. We coexisted; polite and superficial strangers under the skin. So when November 8 happened, we were amazed to find out who was living next door, or even in our own house!

It’s pretty clear we don’t understand each other. Perhaps we don’t really understand ourselves. Hopefully the 2016 election will inspire us to learn more about ourselves and our government and moreover, to become involved in our communities. We can learn to listen respectfully to each other with no other agenda. We can have discussions that don’t deteriorate into shouting matches. Ideas that challenge us are healthy precisely because they make us uncomfortable. They stretch us and keep us growing.

On the morning of November 9, I began a one woman listening campaign. I talked to neighbors on my morning walk. I listened to members of my church, to my family, to my Facebook and Twitter friends. And I heard some surprising things. Some not easy for me to hear. But my friendships were not threatened. In fact, just the opposite. After all, we all want to have our voices heard.

I know the fluttering of the butterfly wing in my tiny corner of the universe cannot influence world events. But just as one vote makes a difference, so does one honest conversation.

So let’s talk! Leave a comment. Tell us what the 2016 election meant for you. Who knows? We might not be as far apart as we thought. At the very least, we are sure to learn more about our own beliefs.

If you’re like me, by now you’re wishing this election campaign was over, or better yet had never started in the first place. We all have opinions and theories, disappointments, predictions and concerns around any election, but this one is different. It would be easy to become so frustrated and confused that we consider skipping the whole thing. But at the end of the day, the important, the crucial thing is to JUST DO IT, in the familiar words of the Nike slogan. Important for all of us, but especially for any of us who have felt the pain of having our voices ignored or discounted, in other words, for most women at some point in their lives. Even now. And it’s not so long ago that women’s voices were not only ignored, they were suppressed.

To put it in perspective:

Freed male slaves were granted the vote in 1845.* The Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote in 1920.

And here’s another shocker: In 1923, the National Women’s Party proposed a Constitutional amendment, eventually known as the Equal Rights Amendment to prohibit all discrimination on the basis of sex.

It has Never Been Ratified.

The women’s suffrage movement in America began in New York in 1848, led by well-known early pioneers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude for their enormous sacrifices and their perseverance to achieve for us a right we often take for granted, if we think about it at all.

However, there is another compelling and little known tale of struggle and dedication to suffrage in Mississippi. By 1820, a growing number of southern women in Mississippi had mobilized to improve social and educational conditions for women and children and the National American Woman Suffrage Association was formed. In 1890, The Mississippi Constitutional Convention seriously considered granting women the right to vote. Sadly, the proposal died in committee by a single vote.

In the 1890s the Mississippi Woman Suffrage Association, under the leadership of Nellie Nugget Somerville, began efforts to gain the vote in Mississippi. The fledgling movement floundered in spite of heroic efforts by the suffragists. Facing fierce opposition by the legislators, by the 1900s they had almost given up. In 1906, Belle Kearney, a compelling professional speaker, breathed life into the nearly moribund movement and gradually the suffragists regained momentum. However, they could not win over the
necessary majority of state legislators, and the state suffrage campaign of 1914 failed. Legislators declared that woman suffrage was “not in the best interest of Mississippi women, that women should remain ‘queen of the home and hearthstone.'”

In 1918, a state suffrage amendment was once again introduced and received a tie vote, insufficient to meet the required two-thirds majority. In 1919 a resolution was introduced to reject the amendment as “unwarranted, unnecessary and dangerous interference with state’s rights.” The rejection resolution was approved by a vote of 106 to 25. At this point, many of the suffragists left the movement in despair.

But it was not over.

By now the Nineteenth Amendment had been ratified by 35 states and some Mississippi senators felt the state must do likewise for the sake of the Democratic Party. The bill was recalled, amended to read “ratify” rather than “reject” and the bill passed the Senate.

But it was not over

The House rejection was swift and decisive. As one legislator put it, he would rather “die and go to hell” than vote for it. The amendment went down 90 to 23.

But it was not over.

By 1920, Mississippi was only one of two states in the nation that had not ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. However, as a federal law, it superseded the state law and provided women the vote. Ironically, two years later, Mississippi’s two leading suffragists, Somerville and Kearney, were elected to the state legislature, surviving the battles and winning the war.

The State of Mississippi finally ratified the Nineteenth Amendment with no opposition on March 22, 1984. Neither Kearney nor Somerville lived to see the ratification.

But it was over at last.

So, just in case you were thinking about giving Election Day a pass this time, please take a minute to remember the struggles of our Foremothers on our behalf.

Go Vote.

Just Do It!

____________

*The bill was ratified, but not enforced until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Santa Barbara’s trees, like its oceans and mountains, are one thing she says she never tires of here.”I feel very fortunate to have my car,” she says. “It’s a little cramped, but it’s softer than cement.” For Some Seniors Without Housing: A Parking Lot Is Home; NPR, Sept 18, 2016

My stomach lurches every time I look at this photo. How can this be happening in upscale Santa Barbara? This woman could be my neighbor, the grandmother in the pew next to mine at church, she could be that woman struggling along with me at Pilates class. She probably went to college, paid her bills on time, baked cookies for the PTO, raised a family. Or so it would seem.

Maybe not. Maybe she lived wildly beyond her means, enrolling her kids in expensive private schools, indulging in spas and Mediterranean cruises, driving a Lexus. Rotating credit cards for payment, betting on the return of the pre-recession economy. Or maybe she was forced out of a longterm marriage by a deluded husband frantically trying to recapture his youth. Or maybe she’s a widow bankrupted by overwhelming medical bills.

Maybe. But is something more fundamental in play? In our frenzied rush to achieve “success,” have we have forgotten our need for each other? Have we lost our communities?

I grew up in a tight community. And I hated it. Everyone knew everything you did, and worse, attributed it to your genetics. If your family was properous, that predestined your success, despite all distressing evidence to the contrary. If as in my case, your family
were not wealthy landowners, city fathers or otherwise distinguished, you were not expected to rise above your family’s social standing. No credential, diploma or bank statement could refute this. That was the down side, the only side, I saw growing up.

But no one, no matter what color or family circumstances. NO ONE lived in a car or wanted for food or clean clothes. This was not because were endowed with unnatural virtue or were a microcosm of Christian charity. Far from it. We were mean-spirited, kind, generous, greedy, intellectually gifted and psychotic, industrious, and lazy; like people everywhere. With one major exception: We needed each other. No one had to tell us that. We knew it by birth; we were a poor farming community; if we were to survive, it meant cooperation. It meant community. In our case, a community formed around a church.

The little community still exists; thrives, in fact, and its people are still just as flawed and nosy. Inevitably, though, time has brought change. Its members are more diverse, better educated, more tolerant now. But community foundation never changed. If a neighbor’s house is damaged by flood or fire, the community rebuilds the house and supplies food and clothes. A member’s bad medical diagnosis triggers a rotation of members to supply food and housekeeping. Extra rows are planted in gardens for needy members. The list goes on. And this is why such a photo could never have been, never will be, taken in that community.

So I wonder. Why have our larger urban communities failed this woman? Does she not meet some tedious beaurocratic requirement? Is she in need of psychiatric help? Are there so many like her that community organizations are overwhelmed? Is it even possible for government to organize community? Or can lasting community be forged only on the anvil of fundamental interdependence? Is her plight, then, simply the logical outcome of a society who has forgotten this fundamental truth?

One of the many benefits to me of this blog is the opportunity it provides me to celebrate the successes of fellow southern women writers. I am delighted to showcase Sally Whitney’s latest book, Surface and Shadow, just released today.

A few weeks ago, I asked Sally to share some of her thoughts about being a southern writer and in particular, what inspired her latest book.

What gave you the idea for this novel?

I can’t say that anything gave me the idea for this novel. The idea just seemed to grow. Strong women have always been my favorite characters in novels, so I knew my novel would have a woman as the protagonist. I think women have a hard time being strong because for many years, expectations and requirements have been set against them. Too often, women have to show strength in defying cultural norms before they can be strong anywhere else. I wanted to show this personal battle within my protagonist. I’m also interested in North Carolina cotton-mill towns, partly because very few of them still exist. I put the woman in the cotton-mill town and asked “What if?” And the story grew from there.

Why did you choose to write about the South?

The South chose me. Place is very important to my fiction. Often with short stories I get a sense of place before anything else. I see a backyard vegetable garden baking in the mid-summer sun. Or a front porch sagging under the weight of family generations who have traipsed across it. With Surface and Shadow, I saw the narrow main street of a small town with its decades-old store fronts and a mysterious aging farmhouse partly obscured by trees and flowers.
Always the places I see are in the South, usually in North Carolina. And it’s not just the physical places that draw my thoughts in that direction. It’s a sense of mystery and wonder, history and hope, darkness mixed with light. When I was in graduate school in New Jersey, I tried to write about a woman living in New Jersey, but my professor told me to “get that woman back down south where she belongs.” He knew where my imagination lives.

What do you think are the greatest pitfalls to writing about southern women?

Number one is falling prey to stereotypes. We all know them. Southern women have been caricatured in books and movies and jokes since such means of communication began. But avoiding stereotypes and still conveying some of southern women’s significant characteristics can be tricky. Stereotypes, like caricatures, have some basis in truth. While southern women are not as hung up on social niceties and proper etiquette as they’re often portrayed, we do expect people to be kind to each other. Good manners are nothing more than being considerate of other people. We are not simpering, obedient belles trying to please the men in our lives. We do not go to college just to find a husband. We are independent women, but we often find ways of exerting that independence that are more persuasive than combative. We like men, and generally love a few of them, but they aren’t required to help us lead fully developed lives.

What do you think defines a “southern writer?”

Although southern writers are often defined by where they live, I think they’re more accurately defined by the books they write. My favorite contemporary southern authors, including Lee Smith, Joshilyn Jackson, Tom Franklin, and Fannie Flagg, tell stories of passionate people caught in difficult circumstances, not necessarily unique to the South, but certainly influenced by southern culture, climate, and geography. In Jackson’s gods in Alabama, for example, the great respect many Alabamans hold for football plays an important role. In Franklin’s The Tilted World, which he wrote with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly, the roaring force of the southern Mississippi River is a major character. Heat is often one of my favorite characters in stories by southern writers. Although other parts of the United States can be hot, there’s no heat like southern heat. And heat can make people do crazy things. Southern writers understand the South and its people with all their beauty and their flaws. They know the strong ties between the people and the land and the climate. Their stories could not take place anywhere else.

For more about Sally Whitney and her work, see this blog, May 1, 2015.

In this Sunday, Aug. 14, 2016 photo, Louisiana Army National Guard dump truck, loaded with rescued flood victims, makes it way back to dry land in Walker, La., after heavy rains inundating the region,(AP Photo/Max Becherer)

In the haggard silence, there can be no words

A merciless anguish falls on the sodden bodies

But comforting too, the bodies close

Pressed, crushed together

They are a single throbbing wound

That can only heal as one.

Of all the heartbreaking photos of the flooding disaster in Louisiana, last weekend (and there were so many), this one cries to me the loudest. The faces register shock, disbelief, loss, pain. And yet there are no tears. Old and young stand together, defiant, facing ahead in a solid show of will. Their common suffering has become the bond that will unite them to survive

I grew up knowing the story of Bonnie and Clyde as well as I knew the fairy tales my mother read to me. In fact, in family stories, one of our distant (always emphasized in the telling) cousins was rumored to have sheltered them from time to time. And if you dug long enough, you were sure to find a common ancestor. My family, however, did not see them as the glamorous bank robbers portrayed in the film. We knew the Barrows gang as reckless killers who robbed and killed anyone who got in their way. In their brief run they are said to have killed 13 people, as many as 9 of which were law men. But contrary to the myth that they only targeted banks, they usually robbed small stores or rural gas stations since it was easier to escape detection. Their take was usually small and they were constantly on the run.

Bonnie Parker was not the pistol packing, cigar smoking desperado depicted in the press and crime magazines of the time. She, never smoked cigars – the famous photo of her with a cigar in her mouth was staged as a prank. And as for the pistol-packing outlaw, Bonnie was not actively involved in the shootings, and probably never killed anyone, but only drove the getaway cars.

Bonnie grew up in the depression, the child of a single mother after her father died when she was four. Life was harsh and they struggled to get by. But Bonnie loved music and the stage. She performed in school pageants and talent shows and excelled at writing. She told her friends they would see her name in lights someday, a dream that ironically came true– but in a sadly distorted way.

Both Bonnie and Clyde were devoted to their families and made frequent trips to Dallas to visit. When they had money, they sent it to their families; when they did not, the families sent them food and provisions.

While in prison in 1932 after a failed hardware store burglary, Bonnie wrote a collection of 10 poems called “Poetry from Life’s Other Side,” One of these, “The Story of Suicide Sal,” about an innocent country girl lured by her boyfriend into a life of crime, was left
behind when the gang escaped the police in Joplin, Mo. Two weeks before her death, apparently sensing that the end was near, Bonnie wrote a poem for her mother called “The Trail’s End” that ended with the stanza:

Some day they’ll go down together;And they’ll bury them side by side,To a few it’ll be grief—To the law a relief—But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.

We may never know the true story of Bonnie and Clyde, but their poignant love story shines through. For Bonnie and Clyde it was love at first sight and their love endured overwhelming hardship. Bonnie was still married to her first husband, shocking behavior in those days. Clyde was a hardened criminal constantly on the run. But Bonnie remained a loyal companion to Clyde, although she believed their violent deaths inevitable. Their daily lives were difficult as they struggled to evade discovery, resorting to campfire cooking and bathing in cold streams. In 1933, Bonnie was injured in a car crash and badly burned. She never regained full use of her leg and often had to be carried by Clyde.

After two short years on the run, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were killed in ambush on an isolated stretch of highway in the piney woods near Gibsland, Louisiana, about 50 miles from the farm where I grew up. A combined total of about 130 rounds left their bodies so riddled with holes that embalming was almost impossible. More than 20,000 people attended Bonnie’s funeral, and flowers arrived from all over the country, some said to have been sent by John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd.

Today, you can find Bonnie and Clyde memorabilia – and a t-shirt – at the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum in Gibsland, La. On display are some of Clyde’s guns, Bonnie’s red hat, and grisly photos of the ambush scene. The car in which they were killed is in a casino in Las Vegas; its price being beyond the budget of the little museum in Gibsland. Until recently, the museum was managed by the son of one of the arresting law men but is now under new ownership. The new owner says he may move the museum to nearby Arcadia if he can’t fix the roof.

In 1972, a small monument was erected at the ambush site. Over the years, it has been riddled with bullet holes and covered with entwined hearts and initials of young lovers, apparently hoping for a Bonnie and Clyde romance.

Sadly, against their wishes, the two were buried in separate cemeteries near Dallas. Bonnie was still wearing the wedding ring from her first marriage when she was buried. She was 24 years old.